by Lora Leigh
And what the hell was he doing thinking about love? He was eleven years older than the spritely little hellion and ages older in experience. The last thing he needed was to allow his heart to get mixed up in the roller-coaster ride he’d have with her.
“Let me know if you need any help then.” Alex nodded. “Rogue works tonight and then the next two afternoons at the restaurant if you’re wondering about her schedule.”
A mocking smile tilted Alex’s lips as Zeke stared back at him silently. He didn’t have a damned word to say to that.
When Janey had opened the restaurant to six nights rather than four, Rogue had signed on to help her with it until she could find a dependable manager.
Alex chuckled, moved to his car, and slid inside before putting the vehicle in gear and driving off. Turning, Zeke surveyed the vehicles in the meadow and watched as his deputy loped back to him.
“Coroner is ready to collect the bodies and forensics is ready to release them. You ready?” There was the slightest sarcasm to Gene’s voice.
“Tone down the sarcasm, Gene, you’re pissing me off,” Zeke told him. “If you have a problem with how I run my office, then say so up front.”
Gene’s lips tightened as he glared back at Zeke. “You’re turning into an asshole, Zeke,” he accused him. “You’re throwing away good taxpayer money on a cut-and-dried case of murder-suicide. You act like those Walkers are scions of the county and you have proof of murder.”
“They’re citizens of this county, and they paid their tax dollars,” Zeke informed him. “I figure we can allot a certain amount of it on making certain what happened here; what do you think?”
Gene was one twitch of the lip shy of a sneer. “Well, you obviously don’t need me here wasting my time, too. I’ll head back to the office while you oversee this.”
“You’ll head out on patrol,” Zeke told him softly. “I have this to take care of. File your report before you go off duty, and I’ll check it over when I come in later.”
Gene’s blue eyes glittered for the barest second with calculation. “Gonna go question that Walker girl? She’s family to this rat trash, Zeke.”
“Another word and you’re going to regret it,” Zeke snapped. “Haul your ass out of here and get on patrol. I don’t need your advice or your opinion on the Walkers or this investigation.”
“Murder-suicide doesn’t constitute an investigation,” Gene argued, his face flushing beneath the hot spring sunlight. “Son of a bitch, Zeke. Just ’cause you have a thing for Rogue Walker don’t mean her family ain’t still gutter shit.”
A thing for Rogue Walker. There it was, that knowledge that obviously someone had mistaken his friendship with Rogue for something more than what it was. Simple friendship, he told himself.
So why the hell was he forcing himself to hold back, to keep from curling his fists and plowing them into his deputy’s sneering face?
“You need to take a few days off,” Zeke said carefully. “Several actually. Until you can rein in your mouth, Gene. I’ll file the papers when I get back to the office. Maybe, in a few days, we can discuss your problems with how I run my department and my life and whether or not you can keep your damned nose out of it.”
Otherwise, the man was going to be sporting a broken nose. Before he could follow through with that thought, Zeke strode away from his deputy and headed to the trailer, where the coroner was having the bodies removed.
It was a damned shame, Zeke thought. Those two boys, as wild as they were, weren’t the murder-suicide type. For the most part, Walkers were just ornery. Not lazy so much as fun loving and laid-back. They played hard, worked as much as they had to, and had fun. They weren’t troublemakers, and they weren’t violent. But they were valuable sources on a silent investigation that was still ongoing. And they had been murdered.
“Sheriff.” The coroner, Jay Adams, nodded as Zeke stepped up to him. “I’ll autopsy, just to be sure drugs didn’t play a part, but it looks pretty conclusive in there.”
Jay was middle-aged with a full shock of bright gray hair and thick gray brows. His weathered face was creased with laugh lines and his hazel eyes were somber. He’d been coroner as long as Zeke had been sheriff, and he was damned good at his job.
“I appreciate it, Jay.” Zeke nodded as he watched the assistants load the bodies into the coroner’s hearse.
“Think we need to pull in the coroner’s investigator from the city?” Jay asked then. “We could transport to their facilities. I could get you more information.”
Zeke crossed his arms over his chest and rubbed at his jaw for long moments before nodding. “I’ll clear it through the chief.” Alex wouldn’t argue the decision; he knew as well as Zeke did what they were looking at. “Transport to their facilities and see what we can get.”
“Your gut is working on this one, huh?” Jay grunted. “Hate it when it does that, Zeke. Means we’re gonna end up squabbling with city hall. You know how they like to mess with things.”
“Yeah, I know,” Zeke breathed out roughly, wishing he could trust Jay, that he could discuss his suspicions with the older man. “But like you said, my gut is burning, Jay, and I don’t like it.”
“Eh. That looked a little suspicious to me anyway.” Jay suddenly grinned. “Hell, you know a body just ain’t gonna sit there when someone jumps in the room with a gun. And you know, between here and town, I’m sure I’ll consider the fact that something doesn’t look right about those wounds. They can’t naysay me like they can you.”
Favor given, favor owed. “You got it, Jay.” He clapped the other man on the shoulder. “Let me know how I can return the favor. I’ll be waiting on your report.”
“I’ll try to be quick about it,” Jay drawled. “Helps though when the city coroner happens to be your daughter, huh?”
“That doesn’t hurt a bit,” Zeke agreed with a small chuckle before turning his attention back to the mobile home.
He’d wait until forensics cleared out before going through it himself and feeling the area. Not just investigating it, but feeling it, just to be certain it was the work of the same man that had committed countless other murders in the county over the past twenty-odd years.
Maybe it was him more than the case that had him reluctant to leave and begin the investigation, he thought as the forensics team began to file out. This case meant going to Rogue when he hadn’t seen her in over a month, hell, nearly two months. Not since the warmer spring air had descended on the mountains and she had started riding the Harley to the restaurant. And he hated admitting that he missed those few nights a week he had been driving her back to the bar each night. Missed her teasing and her laughter when he had no right to it.
He wasn’t looking forward to telling her about Joe and Jaime. He didn’t like lying to Rogue, and he had no choice but to hide certain information from her. Information such as the fact that her cousins had been gathering information for him and Homeland Security special agent Timothy Cranston. Information such as the fact that he knew to the soles of his feet that the boys had been murdered by the same man that had killed Zeke’s wife and his father. The same man that Homeland Security has been searching for since the arrest and deaths of Dayle Mackay and Nadine Grace.
The man known only as the exterminator. The backbone of the Freedom League. A man that killed without conscience, without mercy, and without a trace.
TWO
Murder-suicide?
It wasn’t possible.
Rogue sat in a back corner of her bar, stared at the dancers, the drinkers, the bikers, and the good ole country boys and girls that filled the establishment she simply called the Bar. That was what it was. Just a bar. A dance hall. A place to drink. It was the place Nadine Grace and Dayle Mackay’s lackey had drugged her drink almost five years before.
The pieces she had put together over the years suggested the couple in the photos had helped her home. So nice of them. Then they proceeded to let Nadine and Dayle into her home where those pictures ha
d been taken.
She had identified the couple within a year. Her father’s friend Jonesy had quietly taken care of making certain that particular couple never came to Somerset again. Something about a drug buy that the police had received a tip on, and a hell of a long sentence for both of them. But her father hadn’t found out, as far as Rogue knew. Of course, Jonesy, her father’s friend and then Rogue’s, had promised her he would make sure her father didn’t know. How he had managed it, she didn’t know. She was just thankful he had.
And the Bar was home now. She owned it. Her father had owned it before her, his last tie to the county that had seen him as nothing but white trash. They saw her as something even less, she sometimes thought. Like they saw the rest of the Walker clan, like Joe and Jaime.
Running a scarlet fingernail around the lip of the whisky glass in front of her, she tried to beat down the knowledge that here, in this county, the name Walker was, as her father had warned her, well less than sterling. Shiftless was one description. Thieves and gutter trash was another. But Rogue knew her family. Family like Joe and Jaime. They had been filled with laughter, charm. They had a sense of fun inside them that didn’t correlate to the nine-to-five lifestyle others held so highly.
Jaime was steady in his friendships, his laughter. He liked to get drunk and raise a little hell on Saturday nights, and he loved women. Joe had been just like him. Neither of the two men had a cruel or mean bone in their bodies. They weren’t conniving and they had never stolen a thing in their lives.
And now, they were gone.
She had been at the hospital when their sister, Lisa, had told Grandmother Walker that the boys were dead. A light had gone out in the old woman’s eyes.
“Hey, Rogue.”
Her head lifted at the sound of her bartender’s voice at her side. Lifting her gaze, she met Jonesy’s compassionate look.
Jonesy eased his burly body into the seat beside her, his hazel eyes somber as he watched her.
She liked Danny “Jonesy” Jones. A biker with a heart of gold, a mean-assed temper, and a head like a brick. An accident had cut back on his cycling and given him a limp, but he was still as tough and as no-nonsense as he had been when she first met him five years ago.
“Kent watching the bar?” She looked over to the long teak counter filled with customers.
“Kent and that new girl, Lea. She’s a good ’tender.”
Rogue nodded. Lifting her shot glass she tossed back the aged whisky, let her lashes flutter at the burn, then placed the glass back on the scarred table.
“Got a call,” he told her then. “Alex Jansen’s fiancée. Said to tell you the sheriff is heading this way. She’s worried ’bout you. Asked that you call her tonight.”
See, that was the problem with friends, they wanted to know every damned thing. Where your head was, where it was going, what you were thinking, and what you were feeling. She’d made the mistake of making friends with Janey Mackay and her sister-in-law, Chaya, last year. Big mistake. Never mess with Mackays, she reminded herself.
“I’ll call her back later.” She shrugged.
“Sheriff will be here soon.” His thick forearms crossed on top of the table. “Zeke ain’t no man’s fool, Rogue. Or no woman’s. If he’s askin’ questions, then something’s wrong.”
She shook her head at that. “No. He’s just making sure. He’s anal like that, Jonesy.”
She poured herself another drink, sipped at the liquid this time, and stared into the full dance floor. Normally, she would have been out there herself, dancing, laughing, pretending. Always pretending.
“They were good boys, Rogue.” He patted her hand awkwardly and scowled down at her. “You did your best for them, girl, even when I told you they were gonna come to a bad end with all their womanizing. You can’t ask more than that from yourself. Whatever happened up there with them, it’s not on your shoulders.”
Maybe she hadn’t done enough. Joe and Jaime with their laughter and their devil-may-care attitudes. Maybe she had missed something, been too busy, too self-involved to see something that could have saved them.
She couldn’t figure it out. She just couldn’t make it make sense. That was why she was sitting here at a dark table staring into the smoky atmosphere of her bar rather than scandalizing the county as a hostess at the most exclusive and notorious restaurant in the town, Mackay’s. She was here instead, hiding, hiding from the false condolences and the questions she knew she would receive elsewhere.
She was a Walker. White trash, gutter-guzzling sleaze was but one of the nicer descriptions she’d heard. She’d laughed in public over it, sometimes; she shed tears in private and wondered why the hell she stayed.
Pulaski County wasn’t the center of the universe, she had told herself countless nights. She could return to Boston, teach anywhere she wanted to teach, and escape the mountain-bred hypocrisy and cruelties she had known here. But even in Boston, she had never fit in.
And Boston didn’t have Sheriff Zeke Mayes.
God, she was such a fool. If any man had ever proven he had no intention of touching her, then it was Sheriff Mayes. He stared at her sometimes as though the very thought of being around her was horrifying. And then there were times, times his brown eyes had darkened further, his lashes had lowered, and she could see the hunger he thought he was hiding from her.
There were times she wanted to crawl into him and just lay against him. Nights she dreamed of being wrapped in those strong, muscular arms. And there were nights she actually faced the truth that even if it ever happened, it would never last. And she wondered which was worse. Never having? Or having and losing?
“You’re worryin’ me, girl,” Jonesy finally said with a sigh. “Sit-tin’ around drinkin’ and reflectin’ ain’t your way. Remember that? You don’t mope and feel sorry for yourself; we taught you better than that, remember?”
Her lips tilted. “They.” The little mountain bikers’ club that didn’t even have a name. Thirteen overgrown teenagers in men’s and women’s bodies who had known her father at one time or another rallied around her and taught the too-soft little schoolteacher how to be the rogue she had been named for.
They had been regulars at the bar. They had seen the couple she had left with that night, and they had helped her plot her vengeance against them. They had sheltered her for the first year beneath their protection, and they had taught her how to be tough. How to fight. How to laugh at the insults, and how to grow up.
“I’m fine, Jonesy,” she promised him. “Just a little mellow.”
She sipped at the whisky. She didn’t drink it often. It took a certain mood, a certain anger to allow her to enjoy liquor. She was a beer girl, until the anger overflowed her control and she had to face more than she wanted to face.
“A little too mellow to be facing that sheriff.” Jonesy pulled the whisky bottle out of her reach with a temperamental scowl. “You never face your enemy weak, girl. I taught you better than that.”
“Zeke’s not my enemy.” But she didn’t reach for the bottle again.
Zeke wasn’t her enemy, but he was her weakness. He made everything inside her weak, made her ache and heat, and made her wish for things that she knew she couldn’t have.
“Sheriff Mayes is gonna break your heart,” Jonesy warned her with a hint of anger. “Pull yourself up here now. He’s gonna be here soon, and you don’t want to see him while you’re feeling sorry for yourself and missin’ those boys.”
She shook her head, almost smiling. That was Jonesy. Never let them see you bleed. And she was bleeding. She could feel it, from a wound inside her heart that she couldn’t seem to close.
She shook her head. “Joe wouldn’t shoot Jaime,” she said softly. “Neither of those boys would have ever hurt each other, Jonesy, let alone anyone else.”
“If there’s something more involved, then I have no doubt Sheriff Mayes will find it, girl,” he grumbled, his voice becoming more fierce. “Come on, Rogue. He’ll be here any minute. P
ull yourself out of this or you’re gonna hate yourself in the morning. You know how you always end up kicking yourself whenever you let Mayes see you weak.”
She was always weak around Zeke. It was a fact of life. Like taxes and breathing.
“Go tend the bar, Jonesy.” She sighed. “I’ll be fine.”
Jonesy stared at her for long, silent moments. Rogue could feel his worry and his anger. Jonesy always worried about her, and it always managed to piss him off. And tonight after he closed up, he’d probably call her father, and her parents would worry then, too. If she wasn’t careful, her father would end up on her doorstep and then talk about stirring up some stink. The closest he’d come to Somerset since leaving it so long ago was Louisville. She always met him there. God help her if he ever actually came here.
Jonesy rose to his feet. His heavy hand gripped her shoulder for a second in a tender hold before he heaved out a hard breath and moved through the crowd, back to his bar.
Zeke was coming, and she was weak. He would be here soon, and she felt lost and alone and uncertain. She hated feeling that way; she avoided him at all costs when she felt that way, because she wanted nothing more than to curl against his broad chest and make all the darkness that seemed to surround her go away.
As though he could do that.
She finished the whisky in the glass, capped the bottle, and motioned to the waitress to take it away before rising to her feet.
Four-inch heels were like a second skin to her feet. Vivid red to match the scalloped lace edges of the scarlet camisole she wore beneath her black sleeveless leather vest. It was paired with a short leather skirt that showed off her legs and flashed her upper thighs. Flipping back the riotous red gold curls that flowed over her shoulder, she drew in a hard breath and made her way across the bar to the door that led back to the kitchens and the steps to her upstairs apartment.
She wasn’t facing Zeke while the customers of the Bar watched on. Jonesy would direct him upstairs.